英语专业八级考试翻译笔记

英语专业八级考试（TEM8）翻译部分笔记

（2011）

第一部分：英译汉

一. 词语翻译（选义）

1. 专八基本词汇

2. 词义选择

1）句子结构

Our world is bursting with knowledge - but desperately in need of wisdom. Now, when sound bites are getting shorter, when instant messages crowd out essays, and when individual lives grow more frenzied, college graduates capable of deep reflection are what our world needs. （2007年）学生译文：如今，狗被咬伤的疗程缩短了，速溶的消息漫天横飞，充斥着我们的文章。当同居的生活变得疯狂，大学毕业生深层次反射的正是世界的需求。

参考译文：在这个人际交流话语变得越来越简短，传统的写作形式被即时信息所取代，人们的个人生活也变得越来越疯狂的时代，我们需要的正是那些富有反思精神的大学毕业生。（邹申，《全新英语专业八级考试指南》，上海外语教育出版社，2009）

Winners do not dedicate their lives to a concept of what they imagine they should be: rather, they are themselves and as such do not use their energy putting on a performance, maintaining pretence, and manipulating others. They are aware that there is a difference between being loving and acting loving, between being stupid and acting stupid, between being knowledgeable and acting knowledgeable. （2002年）

参考译文：成功者不会毕生致力于想象自己应该成为何种人。相反，他们即他们自己。因此，他们不会费神去装腔作势，故作姿态，摆布他人。他们明白：真爱与装爱，真傻与装傻，真知与假知、真博学与假博学之间是有区别的。

In addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category, namely, having children in order to maintain or improve a marriage: to hold the husband or occupy the wife; to repair or rejuvenate the marriage; to increase the number of children on the assumption that family happiness lies that way. （1999年）

参考译文：此外，有一类家庭原因与下列类别不无共通之处，这便是：生儿育女是为了维系或改善婚姻：能拴住丈夫或者使妻子不致于无所事事；修复或重振婚姻；多子多孙，以为家庭幸福惟有此法。

Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only half playfully judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year. （2000年）

学生译文：作家们无法忍受这一事实：约翰济慈二十六岁时就死了，于是就几乎半开玩笑地评判他们自己的一生是个失败，这时，他们才刚刚过了这一年。

参考译文：诗人约翰济慈二十六岁便盍然长逝，作家们对此深感惋惜。他们过了26岁之后，便不无戏谑地叹息自己一生无所作为。

2）文化语境

Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of

biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. （2005年）参考译文：然而，人们对书籍往往求非所予。开卷之时，我们常常思想模糊，思维割裂，苛求小说真实，认定诗歌造作，视传记为美化，期望史书认同一己之见。

3）文章主题

Opera is expensive: that much is inevitable. But expensive things are inevitably the province of the rich unless we abdicate society’s power of choice. We can choose to make opera and other expensive forms of culture, accessible to those who cannot individually pay for it. （1997年）

参考译文：欣赏歌剧是一种奢侈：你必须为此支付昂贵的票价。然而，享用昂贵的东西并不完全是富人的特权，除非我们放弃社会选择的权利。我们有权利使歌剧和其他昂贵的文化形式面向大众，面向那些个人没有支付能力的人。

If people mean anything at all by the expression “untimely death”, they must believe that some deaths are on a better schedule than others. Death in old age is rarely called untimely—a long life is thought to be a full one. But with the passing of a young person, one assumes that the best years lay ahead and the measure of that life was still to be taken. （2000年）

参考译文：如果人们藉“英年早逝”这一字眼真的意欲表达什么含义的话，他们必然相信某些人的辞世可以算是寿终正寝，而另一些人则“死不逢时”。死于年迈很少被冠以“死不逢时”之名，因为能度过漫长的一生被认为是甚为圆满的。反之，如果所碰到的是一位年轻人之死，人们会以为这位年轻人风华正茂，前途无可限量，生命的倒计时尚未真正开始。

…… Instead of having shared their original duties, and as school-boys would say, going halves, they discovered that the cares of life had been doubled. （2008年）

参考译文：最起码的义务还未分担（拿学生的话说，这叫“各司其职”），生活中的各种烦心事又接踵而至。（邹申，《全新英语专业八级考试指南》，上海外语教育出版社，2009）

4）代词指代

Then for a little while the house feels huge and empty, and I wonder where my self is hiding. It has to be recaptured slowly by watering the plants and, perhaps, by looking again at each one as though it were a person.

It takes a while, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains, but the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bring back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood.（2004年）

参考译文：找回自我，需要一点时间。我看着浪花迸若喷泉，不过这样的时刻降临了，身边的世界渐次隐遁，自我，再次从潜意识深处浮现，带回了最近的经历，那等待探究和细细品味的经历。

二．句子翻译（意合）

1. 长句化短

1）连词为界

从句连词：that, which, what, when, how…